News
Exciting things are always afoot.
Summer humanities UROP approved for Tomiris Kaumenova
We are thrilled to be welcoming Tomiris Kaumenova to our group for the summer. She will be investigating degree abstraction in Mooré and Ende. Congratulations to Tomiris and to us!
Paper officially accepted at Language!
Our large cross-linguistic study on the interpretation of quantity superlatives has officially been accepted for publication at Language! We are very excited.
The paper, entitled Universals in Superlative Semantics, and authored by Elizabeth Coppock, Elizabeth Bogal-Allbritten, and Golsa Nouri-Hosseini, reports on the results of a broad cross-linguistic study on the semantics of quantity words such as many in the superlative (e.g. most). While some languages use such a form to express both a relative reading (as in Gloria has visited the most continents) and a proportional reading (as in Gloria has visited most continents), the vast majority do not allow the latter, though all allow the former. It is argued that a degree-quantifier analysis of quantity superlatives is best suited to explain why proportional readings typically do not arise for them. Based on morphosyntactic evidence, two alternative diachronic pathways through which proportional quantifiers may develop from quantity superlatives are identified.
You can read the accepted version here.
Poster accepted at ELM!
Danielle Dionne and Elizabeth Coppock have had their abstract accepted as a poster at the very first Experiments in Linguistic Meaning conference, to be held in Philadelphia. The title of the submission is:
Tattoos as a window onto cross-linguistic differences in scalar implicature
From one of the reviews: "This poster is NOT about tattoos, much to my relief. (The title will surely turn away interested consumers.)"
Danielle Dionne presents at LSA!
Danielle Dionne presented her fascinating research on cross-linguistic pragmatic differences at the LSA conference in New Orleans!
The slides are available here.
Congratulations Alex Acosta on UROP award!
Alex Acosta has received an award through UROP to pursue an original research project on polarity particles. Specifically, he will be investigating cases where "yeah" and "no" co-occur, as in: "Yeah no, I agree".
Anastasiia Tatlubaeva receives UROP award
Anastasiia Tatlubaeva received a UROP award for Fall 2019! She will be studying superlatives in Slavic, especially the morphosyntax of universal standards in superlative constructions in Russian (vsekh vs. vsego).
Danielle Dionne to give LSA talk in New Orleans, January 2020
Danielle Dionne and Elizabeth Coppock submitted an abstract for the Linguistic Society of America's Annual Meeting in New Orleans, January 2020 and it was ACCEPTED as a TALK! Go us! We will be presenting in the Experimental Pragmatics session on Sunday January 5th, 11am-12:30pm.
The title of our talk is: "Cross-linguistic pragmatic differences as a function of hyponym complexity".
Paper published in “Definiteness Across Languages”!
A paper by Elizabeth Coppock, entitled "Most vs. the most in languages where the more means most", has just appeared in a volume entitled Definiteness Across Languages, published by Language Science Press.
Posters presented at CUNY, XPRAG and XPRAG-ADJ
Joint experimental work with Helena Aparicio on the pragmatics and processing of Haddock Descriptions containing gradable modifiers (e.g. "the rabbit in the big/bigger hat") was presented at three venues recently:
- the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference
- XPRAG
- XPRAG-ADJ
First European tour of the summer successful!
Elizabeth Coppock has just returned from Potsdam, Germany where she gave a keynote address at the International Conference on the Structure of Hungarian concerning object agreement.
Prior to that, she was in Utrecht for a dissertation defense, where she presented new experimental results on modified numerals.